Speaker Johnson Makes a Trio of Television Appearances on Day One of the Democrat-Led Government Shutdown

WASHINGTON - After Senate Democrats rejected the clean, short-term continuing resolution for a third time today, Speaker Johnson made a trio of appearances on CNN, Newsmax, and Fox News to highlight the Democrats' hypocrisy and urge Senate Democrats to reopen the government.

Watch Speaker Johnson on CNN here, Newsmax here, Fox News here.

On Democrats repeatedly rejecting the clean, short-term, nonpartisan CR:

Last night, two Democrats and an independent flipped and came along with the Republicans. But it looks like, and what we expect, is that most of the Democrats in the Senate, again will reject the clean CR that we sent over. It's clean, what that means is it's nonpartisan. We didn't add any Republican priorities or poison pills or gimmicks or tricks into that at all. It's 24 pages. I mean, everybody can read it for themselves. It simply continues the Biden-era spending levels that Chuck Schumer and the Democrats have already supported in the past. They just did it most recently in March and gave long speeches about how it was so critically important that we not shut the government down. So, there's nothing for me to give, there's nothing to negotiate. I don't have any Republican priorities to put on the table because we sent over a clean CR and that's why none of this makes sense.

On the Democrat-led shutdown inflicting pain on the American people:

And I think as this thing goes forward, and more pain is felt by the American people because of the shutdown. I think they're going to leave Chuck Schumer by himself in a corner that he painted himself into. Now let's very quickly say, when we talk about pain for the American people, this is very real. I mean, what's happening right now is not only do you have our troops, our military, our TSA agents, border patrol agents, working without pay, veterans, their services are being delayed also. What they've done by shutting the government down is they have stopped the WIC program. What is that? Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition Program. They've stopped mental health services and telemedicine for lower income, Medicaid and Medicare recipients who are getting healthcare at home. All those programs are going to stop. They have stopped now because Chuck Schumer decided to play politics for selfish reasons. It's really shameful.

On Democrats not understanding their own provision to provide healthcare to illegal aliens:

That's probably why the Democrats don't understand what they filed. But if you interpret that and you get through all the subsections, what you realize is they're trying to take out, in entirety, the reforms that we put into the big beautiful bill pertaining to health. And why is that so important? Because what we did was we strengthened the Medicaid program by making sure that ineligible recipients are not on the rolls. The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, on August 25, published a letter and they said, this is going to do exactly what Republicans said. They estimate that 2.3 million illegal recipients for Medicaid will be pushed off the rolls because of our reforms and that it's going to save $185 billion of taxpayer funds. So, they want to return all those ineligible people back to the rolls, and many of them are illegal aliens. That is a fact. And anybody who looks at it objectively has to say it's true.

###